Cooking is a game mechanic that becomes available after upgrading the farmhouse for the first time. The house upgrade adds a kitchen, which includes a stove and a refrigerator. The stove is the cooking interface, while the refrigerator provides 36 slots of storage space, similar to a chest. The refrigerator is unique in that it is directly linked with the cooking interface, as if it were an extension of the player's inventory. Only ingredients in the player's inventory or refrigerator are seen as usable items for a recipe.
The player must learn each recipe before it is unlocked for cooking. Locked recipes are displayed as a black silhouette of the recipe icon, with a tooltip description that says "???." Unlocked recipe icons will appear greyed-out if any of the ingredients are missing, but the tooltip will provide information regarding the recipe. Any missing ingredients will be highlighted in red. If all the ingredients required for a recipe are present either in the player's inventory or the refrigerator (or a combination of the two) the recipe icon will become fully highlighted.
Stat Bonuses
Eating a food with stat changes will wipe out any active stats and replace them with just the stats from the newly eaten food.
Duration of the stat bonuses for food appears to lower as the day progresses. For example, if Fish Stew is eaten early in the day its duration is 16+ minutes. If eaten at 10pm it only lasts 2-3 minutes. This may have been done so that high quality food such as Fish Stew which gives +3 Fishing will last the rest of the day - if the game is played at original speed. If mods are used that extend the day, foods become less valuable later in the day.
Achievements
There are three Achievements associated with Cooking:
Note:Escargot and Fish Stew are in opposite places on the cooking screen accessed through the stove (shown below) than on the collections tab on the player menu (thumbnail shown at right).
A minimum of 77 different items are needed to cook all 71 dishes in game, 6 of which are dishes used as ingredients.
These tables assume you will used the first crafted dish to make another crafted dish (e.g., You will use 1 Potato to make Hashbrowns, then use those Hashbrowns to make Complete Breakfast. You will need 1 more Potato to make Hashbrowns for Dish o' The Sea).
While most recipes will sell for less than the cost or profit from their ingredients, there are a few that will always result in profit when using the lowest quality ingredients: